


Arachne

by toujours_nigel



Category: Alexander Trilogy - Renault
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-19
Updated: 2010-03-19
Packaged: 2017-10-08 03:08:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/72060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for the Spooky Story Event, 2009</p>
    </blockquote>





	Arachne

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Spooky Story Event, 2009

In the second room—called so from courtesy, and because they cannot be called anything else—there is a boy lay hidden, who starts up holding a knife that his grandfather knew sharp, and must be held in one hand and killed. He cannot be more than ten, and looks younger, bleeding into the dust at Ptolemy’s feet. Alexander turns to him, shoulder against his breast, and whispers, “Get me away.” He, still staring at the spill of blood, wakes, almost out of a daze, feels the eyes burning on his face, the skin hot to the touch. “Get me away,” Alexander says again, fingers tight around his wrist, and he realises, cursing his slowness, that the heat is not battle-fever, or not only.

Ptolemy, turning when no footsteps follow, sees the two go through a broken door, the golden head against an armoured shoulder, Hephaistion’s arm wrapped around him. “How long,” Hephaistion says, low and urgent, and “could you not have told me?”

“It would only have made it harder,” Alexander says, and his voice is a rasp, “to have you worry. Further.”

The space where they have stopped is empty—only a hand keeps them company, the splinters of bone showing white through the flesh. “You need water,” he urges, because his fingers are burning against Alexander’s skin, “have you any?” Alexander does not answer, only moves away, shaking off his arm, eyes staring into the darkness, and he follows, forcing his voice calm. “You should have told me, I could have carried water, easily. Wait here, I will go back and ask Ptolemy.” He dislikes asking anything of Ptolemy, who certainly will look at him as though he should have known that this would happen and prepared ahead, but Alexander must have what Alexander needs. Alexander turns fast enough to swing into him, who has not moved from his place, and he holds him quietly close, ashamed to revel in it. “If you will not let me loose,” he says, and hopes his voice is laughter, “at least let us stay here.” All his daimons scream against this place, the night air would be better; cold he can guard against, better than this slow dread, and the stubbornness that has taken hold of Alexander, almost as though he is in the grip of some god, or chthonic malevolence. “There is,” he says, hand creeping into his hair, combing through its unruliness, “nobody here but I; and you need the rest, Alexander.”

“A little further,” Alexander says, and pulls himself away. “We should,” he smiles, and that, at least, is pure mischief, “explore our new domains.”

He nods eager assent, and dogs Alexander over the fallen masonry and around broken walls, grisly with the last stand of the defenders, pulling his eyes away from their staring eyes. He would have followed anyway, but now has no need to stop himself from reaching out an apologetic hand to steady Alexander, to pull his burning hand away from the pommel of his sword, to cut away himself the festooning cobwebs of the room Alexander finally decides far enough from all others that he can show himself as human. It has no other merits—small, and suffocating even on top of the tower, and everywhere the cobwebs. He stops to sheathe his sword, still tangled in the webs, and puts down his cloak against the cold of the stone floor—though would it perhaps help Alexander to have it against his heated skin?—and pushes him gently down. “I haven’t water.”

“Do you think,” Alexander asks, eyes shadowed, frowning slightly, as though he will bend to his will all things, “these people worshipped Arachne?” A spider crawls into his hand—the walls are thick with them, dangling like so many black beads from their webs—and he lifts it to his face, scrutinising.

“No,” he says, flicks it away, tips out his water into his hand—precious few drops, he should have gone back to ask Ptolemy for his—and passes it over Alexander forehead, presses shut his too-thin eyelids, “nobody worships Arachne, Alexander, she was mortal, she was defeated, what’s the point, why would anybody,” he stamps a spider underfoot, “in their right minds worship Arachne?”

“She was not defeated,” Alexander says, and his hand is a gag over his mouth, so tight he can feel his teeth pressing into the flesh of his lips, taste the copper of blood. “The gods are jealous, often, of human perfection; that jealousy,” his daimons are screaming at him, louder and louder, too loud, now, to ignore, “brought her down, not any flaw in her tapestry, for there was none.”

“I honour Arachne for what she was,” he protests, the blood in his mouth coating his tongue, “but why call her a goddess, or worship her?” It is not like Alexander to be so savage in his advocacy of the old worship.

“Why worship Athena,” Alexander counters, and stands to pull him bodily around, “save to honour her?” The doorway is black with the webs he cut away, though they lie still on the floor. “Why worship Arachne any less, should you honour her?”

Alexander’s eyes hold none of the fear he knows capture in his own, and his skin, crouched close, has an animal heat that does nothing to stop his shudder at the spider crawling up beyond his boot. He reaches down to set it gently on the floor. “I would not call Prometheus a god,” he says, reaches up to pull a spider from Alexander’s hair, “for the gods did badly by him. Why should I call Arachne kin to one who from jealousy destroyed her?”

When he meets Alexander’s eyes, he knows he has spoken the right words, if not in the right manner—he would like his gods in their temples, but Alexander lives as the heroes did, and the god speaks to him. So he waits in the centre of the room, willing hostage, as Alexander slices through the cobwebs—efficient and neat, letting it fall like a tapestry taken from a wall—and finds himself strangely reluctant to step over the spiders milling at his feet. This is not his land, and he will not have Alexander pay.

It is Alexander, in the end, who comes for him, laughing like the red-booted Dionysos his mother worships—he has gone to the grove, alone, and, once, shadowing Chryse—and takes him by the hand and pulls him through the door, uncaring of the bodies they stamp beneath their feet. Outside they stand and watch the doorway blacken first with spiders, and then, in minutes, the web. Alexander’s breath is hot against his ear, he is laughing, still. “Were you scared?”

“I was,” he admits, takes up his fevered hands and kisses them, then his laughing mouth. The touch burns him like passing a hand over dying embers. “You’re burning up.”

“Ask Ptolemy for his water,” Alexander says, and he laughs, nothing but relief, at being let forget the room. “You should have carried more.”

“You should have told me,” he returns, still reproachful, “what if you had fallen, in the charge?” Or to the swords, he doesn’t say, what if yours had been this head staring up at me from the floor, and kicks it out of sight.


End file.
